


love, your book will end just fine

by GoldenThreads



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Empathy, Established Relationship, Illustrated, M/M, Medical Conditions, Nurse kink, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reading Aloud, References to Depression, Telepathy, Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-04 07:25:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14015217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: Sick of human translation issues, Warlock takes some creative liberties to get his two favorite undead mopers communicating again.--When something thick and syrupy and definitely not his furnace started to pool in Jono's chest, a ghostly heart thudding like a mammoth wading through tar, he very calmly laid down on the couch and began looking up local exorcists on his phone. This was it. He was officially a dead thing so long uninhabited that something else had come to scope out the neighborhood.





	love, your book will end just fine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [InkSplatterM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSplatterM/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Dead Men Walking](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10715199) by [InkSplatterM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkSplatterM/pseuds/InkSplatterM). 



> Warnings for the general body horror that is Chamber's very existence. This follows Ink's 616 canon where Doug and Jono communicate via sign language, but otherwise can stand alone. Vaguely Utopia era.
> 
> Title from Keaton Henson's "Judging Books by their Covers."
> 
> But I can't help but feel sorry,  
> Cause love, your tale will end just fine,  
> But mine is a different story.  
> Mine is a different story. 

"I don't love him."

The words hung in the air like a breeze in the dead heat of the desert. Doug shrank into his chair, wishing he could take them back, though the pitying look he feared hadn't yet crept onto Warlock's face. Still his traitorous mouth forged on without him, eager to take a sledgehammer to all the pretty facades he'd built.

"He thinks I do. Well, hopes, sometimes. He'd never believe it but wants to be proven wrong. And I can't. I don't love him. I can't love him or anyone." Doug waved a hand as though it were simple fact, as though waving away his lingering humanity. His words kept tumbling free. "Most times I look at him and feel nothing at all. It's not—it has nothing to do with him, but he'll think it does. I've lied to him for too long now."

"Conclusion," Warlock began carefully, a grad student ready to defend his thesis. "You wish to tell him how you feel."

Doug picked at a loose thread on his sock. If he pulled it tight enough, the elastic bit into his skin. "Something like that. Then he'll have to understand. I don't want to lie to him but I can't hurt him either. I can't. He’s—he’s been hurt enough. I should’ve known better."

"…May Self try?"

Doug gave him a Look. If he, with all the world's languages and communication on his tongue, couldn't figure out a way, then how would Warlock manage? But he seemed so earnest that all of Doug's protests failed him. "Buddy, you're welcome to give it a shot."

 

*

 

It wasn't every day an alien handed you an Empathic Consent form, gave you three days to review it, and then shyly expressed his hope that you'd want to sign. It was fifteen pages long. There were footnotes and citations. Jono raised an eyebrow, flipped to the last page, and dashed off a _Jonothon Evan Starsmore._

"Protest: You **must** read it, selfriend. Self must ensure you comprehend what--"

[I trust you.]

Warlock deflated, bemoaning how humans insisted on ignoring all his attempts at interspecies communication protections. "Acknowledged: TLDR. Self = Empathicbeing. What humanbeings term _empathy_ is simple sensory parameter to Self. Self can receive and project. Self wishes to project Selfsoulfriendoug's empathic variables to you."

With a shrug, Jono stuffed his hands back into the pockets of his jacket. He nearly asked why Doug couldn’t express such emotions himself, but they both knew who they were dealing with here. [What’s brought on the touchy-feely crap?]

The alien’s crest drooped a few centimeters, nerves otherwise imperceptible. There was an explanation in there somewhere, swimming around his circuits, yet the words never took shape. “Self will tell you after,” Warlock promised, as serious as he was vague.

 

*

 

Jono couldn’t breathe.

There had never been a moment where he felt his lungs burn up, his last breath shrivel and twist into smoke, his ribs ache with a panic that could actually be caged within. While he could summon up the muscle memory if he tried hard enough, there wasn’t much point. His lungs were a clinical loss, not a traumatic one. He’d been a little preoccupied with the rest of his body’s clusterfuck at the time.

So when something thick and syrupy and definitely not his furnace started to pool in his chest, a ghostly heart thudding like a mammoth wading through tar, Jono very calmly laid down on the couch and began looking up local exorcists on his phone. This was it. He was officially a dead thing so long uninhabited that something else had come to scope out the neighborhood. Jubilee would never let him hear the end of it.

It didn’t ebb and flow with quiet intensity. It rolled like a wave never destined to crest, trapped building and building and building, with miles of serrated coral to greet anyone who plunged under the surface.

A breath, just one, and it all froze to glass.

Trapped on the knife’s edge, Jono pushed to his feet and made his way down into the belly of Utopia. If there was something wrong with his furnace, he may as well report it to the doctors. They wouldn’t be able to do shit but Doug always nagged him if the records weren’t strictly accurate. For someone who faked a transmode negative reading every checkup, he was one to talk.

Jono could see the lights on in Doug’s workroom as he passed. He stalled in the hallway, chest still full of icy shrapnel, then strolled right in. Since he couldn’t toss a telepathic hello into the techno-fortress of Doug’s head, he knocked on a cabinet halfway into the room.

The glass burned, waves roiling under the cracks, tectonic plates shifting back into place – permanent, unquestioned, untenable. The last slip of an iceberg back underneath the dark water. Untroubled seas. Release. The same false buoyancy Jono felt every time he loosened his wrappings and let the cavernous furnace of his chest burn free.

Doug was watching him. A question on his lips, asked twice with no answer. He quirked an eyebrow and waited.

 _Oh_ , Jono thought. The urge to lift a hand to his chest was nearly overwhelming, like a teenager feeling butterflies flutter through him for the very first time. Jono wasn’t so pedestrian, but the fact remained: he could taste his boyfriend’s relief on a tongue he didn’t have.

“Did you need something?” Doug asked evenly, as if Jono had walked in on something important and he was trying to be polite.

 _Need a fucking grip_.

Jono crossed the room and sat down on the long, low bench against the far wall. Hopefully it hadn’t looked too much like a collapse, even though it absolutely was. Organs he didn’t even have were failing. He was light-headed. He might’ve even had a blood pressure for a minute there if anyone had checked.

When he felt Doug’s eyes skitter over him yet again, he rolled over onto his side to face the wall. He was there for a nap. Act casual. Nothing out of the ordinary here.

The typing resumed.

Months earlier, when Jono had made this little perch for himself in Doug’s workroom, he’d purposefully set it up within Doug’s line of vision as a distraction. He cursed himself for it now. Doug’s awareness burned on the back of his neck, a live wire down his spine, and every time those eyes flickered his way, he felt a faint breath rattle through his chest. Not the slow and steady one-two-three, one-two-three that helped with panic attacks, something more biting and fragile, like icicles breaking off in the sun’s heat and punching their way through frost-armored snowbanks below.

His phone buzzed in his pocket with a message from Warlock.

[Are you okay?]

Jono reached out telepathically and was unsurprised to find the alien lingering nearby, reading them from beyond the sea walls. [Do you feel this shit **all the time**?]

He couldn’t hear Warlock’s laughter, but he felt it echo down into his toes.

 

*

 

Even during the ephemeral, three-hour period of youthful naivete when Jono believed being an X-Man wouldn’t completely suck, he had never had much of a stomach for field missions. In fact, his enthusiasm for them was entirely on par with how much stomach he had left. An utter fucking void. Sure, a pub punchup wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening, but that kind of mission was rare.

Mostly it was getting sent out on a weekday morning with teammates he barely knew and certainly didn’t like, kidnapped to a supervillain’s newest pocket universe by lunch, clawed up by dinosaurs, dropped in slime, yanked back out days later, and sassed the whole way home about how this was why they never took him anywhere. His phone was at the bottom of a jelly ocean, he’d been off the grid for three days, and when they finally reached the San Francisco Bay, Colossus chucked him off the plane under orders from Emma to run him through the wash if he smelled like a prehistoric sewer.

Swimming was unfortunate. Could he? Sure, but the water got everywhere and sloshed in a way that had body horror written all over it. At least a shower was on dry land. Floating was another issue, as he didn’t exactly have the necessary organs and fat cells for easy buoyancy. Far easier to kick his way over to the nearest rock and send a pointed telepathic scream at Utopia’s beachrats until one came to pick him up. Bribable children were the only ones he liked.

By the time he climbed the stairs to his floor, it had been four days since he’d gotten to lie down for anything more restful than reevaluating his life choices while face-down in mud.

Four days of quiet.

This time there was no undertow, no whiplash jarring his insides back to life. It was more of a green screen: every step closer to his room, the more the background faded, replaced by a perfect emptiness.

The ache of it twinged in his fingertips like lightning eager to race from a god’s hands and break the infinite dark. Space, he realized—void of stars, of life, of all creation, the everlasting moment of boundless potential, liminal and dim. No comets streaking through the night, no roaring sun against his cold cheeks. Sheer nothingness.

Unborn constellations rattling in his bones, Jono nudged open the door to his room. He knew he’d find Doug waiting there, too much weight of stymied creation singing too near, but instead of a frustrated, blank-eyed boyfriend pacing the room, Jono found the man fast asleep in Jono’s own bed.

Peaceful wasn’t the word. Not for that universe before life began, and not for the way Doug slept, worry sharp in the line of his jaw. Jono reached out to trace his cheek. There were no fireworks, no warm glow to light up his heart like a jack-o-lantern. Doug merely sighed, leaning slightly into the touch, his dog-eared book slipping from his fingers to tumble over the edge of the bed.

Jono left him there as he went to wash down. His wrappings had prevented an internal disaster zone, but it still took time to get the rest of him in order. His heart didn’t help. Stars bubbled into the distance, suds instead of starshine, a soft tumult instead of the Big Bang blazing through. Still no planets, no riotous glory, yet a presence where once had only been absence. Hope instead of possibility.

“Four days,” Doug rumbled when Jono slipped into bed next to him. He sounded angrier than he looked, all bleary eyes and languid frown. “What did you—”

“Dinosaurs,” signed Jono. “Story tomorrow.”

Doug blinked at him.

The thing about constellations was that they could spell anything. He could connect those distant pinpricks into words, divine any meaning he wanted to find, or watch them carve fissures in the landscape, break apart the careful vacuum and leave not even poetry behind. But the one thing he didn’t feel was relief. Doug stared at him like an unmade world; he stared at him like he’d only ever known the chasm of his chest, not the nice fiction of a man on the outside.

Did he read in poetry? Did he see blankets in an empty bed, or had he purposefully clad himself in smoky wrappings, standing in as the only heart Jono had to call his own. Longing had a language, surely.

Yet none of it was on his face or in his star maps. An emptiness adrift, no more.

“Tomorrow,” Doug said and turned out the light.

 

*

 

[Do we taste like metaphors?]

It was a stupid question. Jono had been trying to phrase it for days, ever since he signed that stupid consent form, but nothing could really capture what he was trying to ask. He was a musician for god’s sake – people were only lyrics in the end.

Warlock tilted his head and plucked another French fry from the basket he held in his hands. He’d followed Jono into the city for a Can’t-Stay-On-This-Goddamn-Nightmare-Island-Another-Second run and managed to acquire junk food wherever they went. “Metaphors?”

[The empathy.]

Warlock blinked.

Coming to a halt, Jono narrowed his eyes and gave Warlock a proper glower. [You’ve been feeding me an emotional shitfest for a week. Don’t play dumb. What’s it like for you?]

Another French fry disappeared into Warlock’s greedy maws. “Oh. Not like that.” Another fry. “Selfriendjono’s brain trying to make sense of unknown input. Poetic language appears natural fit.”

[How’s it _unknown input_ if I have human emotions too?]

“You do?” Warlock asked, fake shock and real mirth wiggling in his brow.

[Fuck off.]

Catching the murderous glint in Jono’s eye, he puffed out a big sigh and shoved his spindly hands into his hoodie pockets, French fries and all. “Humans only wired to understand individual emotions. Every individual different. This explains translation necessity. Metaphor bridges gap in real-time.”

[Great. So only Doug can translate Doug, but Doug’s the one person Doug can’t translate.]

Something like a laugh burst from Warlock’s mouth, followed in quick succession by his hands clamping down over top of it all. His eyes were wide and panicked.

[…Did you just spit up your chips.]

Steadying himself, Warlock pulled his hand away and whined in a perfect Jono playback, “ _I have human emotions too!”_

 

*

 

To Jono’s disappointment, Doug felt things for other people, too.

He’d spent the last four hours trying to wrangle a tune into the proper shape, a musical remix of all those baffling metaphors he’d been gathering all week. Warlock still hadn’t told him the what and why, but Jono figured it was something about the untranslatable, all Doug’s signs and symbols getting jumbled in his head without hope for escape. It was something any musician could understand. Maybe he should just hand Doug a guitar.

Something creeped along his sluggish veins, vines seeking a willing trellis. He listened for the music of it, brought his plec to the strings.

Barbed wire curling tight around naked calves, blood and laughter.

Jono tossed his guitar back in its case and shoved his feet into his boots, not bothering with the laces. He followed the choking weeds like a worried farmer and hurried downstairs to the training rooms. Only when he heard voices did he stop.

“You’re such a fucking nerd,” Roberto laughed, jostling Doug’s shoulder as the team filed out of a simulation.

Doug’s ears burned red, though his eyes were bright and clear. “That may be, but the way I hear it, you’re the only one who ever tried to get _dating tips_ from the _Danger Room_.”

Sam and Amara choked at the memory and laughed aloud.

“At least I didn’t ask _Captain Kirk!_ ” This time Roberto shoved him for real, catching Doug’s shirt in his fist. “What other weirdo programs you got in there?”

Dani deftly pushed them apart as she passed through the hallway between them. “Alright boys, share your Danger Kinks later.”

A deep well of shame, barely covered and fit to overflow. Cat’s Cradle in worn twine, knotted around the ankles of every New Mutant, biting to the bone on a certain Brazilian billionaire, chains in old blood. This wasn’t music.

“Please, if he _shares_ another word from his Tom Selleck poetry book I’ll hurl.”

With a laugh, Roberto reached out and grabbed Doug’s shoulder once more, giving it a squeeze as they walked down the hallway.

Jono could feel the twist of poison in Doug’s stomach, that overwhelming Fight or Flight impulse that gnawed at his marrow every time someone touched him. But he didn’t pull away, not until he was out of Jono’s line of sight, at least. The barbed wire still climbed, angry and rusted, but it curled into fearsome shells around his team. It hurt him to be there. They weren’t careful, they didn’t ask questions and Doug didn’t offer answers, but they were his people. He chose them every time; he chose them over himself, too.

“Query: You are using empathyvariables for mischief?”

A lesser man would have jumped out of his skin at that sly, amused little trill right in his ear. Seeing as Jono was basically just skin and a bad attitude, he managed to spin on his heel and meet Warlock’s eyes without giving an inch.

[You what, mate?]

Warlock’s mouth warbled into a laughing smile, halfway to emoji territory.

“Warlock?”

They turned to see Doug walking back down the hallway towards them. He gave Jono a small, tight smile, the kind that said he was all out of spoons but would whittle them out of his own bones if Jono needed him for something. Then his shoulders dropped, just slightly, and he turned to Warlock.

If the song were his to write, Jono would’ve begun with a sunflower turning desperately to face the brilliant warmth above. A cat’s dark eyes dilating as it prepared to leap, to hurl itself toward something winged and burning, ready to make a mockery of curiosity once more. But the only word that fit was _ambrosia,_ inhuman and eternal, beyond his mere mortal words. Planets orbiting each other in perfect synch, the harmony of the spheres made manifest.

“—required Self’s assistance,” Jono heard Warlock say, the words distant and incomprehensible, an unexpected meteor shower.

“Jono?”

Frost inching in when Jono didn’t answer, Doug’s hands inching towards his even though the touch would burn.

“Just needed his opinion on a piece.” Jono laid his hands flat against the wall and pushed away from it with all his strength, tearing himself away from the suffocating expanse between the selfsoulfriends. He walked backwards down the hall, hands still flying. “I’ll show you when it’s done.”

“O…kay.” Doug gave him a strange look, humoring him, offering one last gasp of blinding attention before he turned back to Warlock.

 

*

 

Jono knew it was a bad idea.

The only time Doug had ever brought up Jono’s wrappings, he’d had that hacker’s glint in his eye, the kind of curiosity that would put him back in the ground someday. It was one thing for Paige to romanticize it with teenage naivete, _that_ he could laugh off in a huff of smoke. Unwrapping the gift would only make her hurl in the bin, no matter what Beauty and the Beast parody she thought she was living in.

Doug was different. Doug read, analyzed, and extrapolated. He probably had fifteen scenarios plotted out in his head before he ever mentioned it, an offhand suggestion perfectly tailored for Jono to laugh off and only think about later. Jono hadn’t laughed. It wasn’t much of a fight, one man biting his tongue while the other clenched his fists, only silence between them. But it was the worst they’d had.

It wasn’t _about_ Doug, that was the thing. It didn’t matter which scenario won out in his cost-benefit analysis, all of them boiled down to Doug thinking he could change something, convince Jono of something, if only he could sneak a peek in the bloody cavern of his guts. Warlock had purged his team of any sense of body horror, that Jono could understand, but Jono wasn’t a roadside attraction no matter how strong a stomach you brought with.

A solid eighty, eight-five percent wasn’t about Doug.

But.

Part of it, maybe five percent tops, was about how he’d have to look in Doug’s face the whole time. About how Doug’s words were an art form, polished marble instead of a raw hurl of paint against canvas. About how he’d lie and Jono wouldn’t be able to tell, not from his words, not from his face, not even from the dull smile he’d give, the one he always forgot to pull into his eyes. About how he might tell the truth and Jono would never know, which would be even worse. There wasn’t enough left inside of him for doubt and loathing to carve any new caverns. All vacancy and no rooms to spare.

If Jono did it now, _right now_ , then he’d know for sure. As long as it was the truth, he could live with it. He wouldn’t have a choice.

Jono caught Doug just after a run – not a drop of sweat on him, but his ankles always jittered nervously for twenty minutes after, heels striking softly against the feet of his work chair. It took him a while to switch gears from the infinite stimuli of the cityscape to the enclosed regularity of his workroom. Though his fingers swept the keyboard as fast as ever, half the time they drummed uselessly below the spacebar, impatient for his brain to catch up. It was the best time of day to throw paper airplanes at him. Jono had once managed six before he even noticed; one had even stuck in the collar of his turtleneck for five whole minutes.

“You busy?” Jono asked after rapping his knuckles on Doug’s desk for attention. “Need a favor.”

“Digital or—”                                                 

“That should not be your first guess, mate.” He shook his head. Normally, this was a rotten time to get Doug’s full analytical attention on anything – he either needed to program a new web browser entirely in Malbolge or go run his feet down to bloody stumps. Right now it meant he might be too scattered to realize Jono was…well, whatever Jono was doing.

Doug’s eyebrows pulled together. “Is something wrong?”

Jono rubbed at one shoulder before giving his answer. “Pulled something on a mission, been real stiff. It’ll be a pain to change without an extra hand.”

“You need me to remove your clothes,” Doug translated slowly. A wrench tossed into the clunking machine, grinding to a halt. The wheels kept trying to turn in vain as Doug reached for a reason why it would be extremely unhygienic in his workroom, which they all knew he kept pristine.

“ _Sunshine_.” Jono rolled his eyes. When Doug still didn’t connect the dots, Jono mimed a mummy’s stiff pose before reaching up to scratch at the worn edge of his cheek.

“I—”

Apricots in summer. A tree from a stone from a far-off land, tended with sun and rain until it flowered in gratitude and offered up sweet mouthfuls of golden flesh. A greedy child ready to devour the overripe fruit one by one, careless of the punishment to come. Jono flinched at the feel of it, sharp with longing – Doug was no gardener, but Jono _starved_.

“Of course,” Doug answered at last. His voice was soft and strange. Jono could’ve wrapped it in a paper plane and sent it flying away on the breeze.

By the time they reached his room, Jono was prepared to take back every grumpy word he’d ever thought about Paige’s lovesick dream. Naivete, thy name is Jono. He had no idea how this was supposed to go. He didn’t know how to sign half the instructions, he’d be turned the wrong way round for signing half the time anyway, and his entire plan boiled down to one snapshot image of Doug peeling the leather away from his cheeks. Not a fairytale, but…momentous.

What it actually was? Disgusting. He knew that better than anyone, but in his deadass brain the mundanity of it all had slipped away. He’d just invited Doug to come help him tear bloodied leather away from the gnarled edges of his chest. It had been two days since he’d changed his mission wrappings, they’d be all scabbed together and oozing by now. Christ, he didn’t even know if it _smelled._ What would that thought look like, screeching through Doug’s brain before blooming into a metaphor. _Finding a body in the woods on a Boy Scout mission_ , that was Jono’s bet.

“Jono.” Doug’s fingers at his wrist, cold and hesitant. “I don’t have to—”

“Gauze in the cabinet. Leather in the closet. Grab both.” He shrugged off his jacket and left it on the floor where it fell.

Doug took a step back and measured him up.

“Don’t bitch.”

The words were ragged, rushed, lacking the deft emphasis Jono placed on each and every one of the swear words it’d taken him so long to drag out of his teacher. Doug didn’t comment. He went around the room gathering supplies in turn, trying not to look too inquisitive as he finally got an eye on all the mysterious bits and bobs Jono lugged around with him. For a gnarled chunk of flesh, he was impressively high-maintenance.

While Doug poked around, Jono rummaged up a pen and paper, tearing off the scribbled lyrics from the night before. It would be easier to write everything out instead of having to finger spell shit like _collagen._

**Mission wrap needs to tear away easy. Piss poor for long term. Just rip it off. Won’t hurt.**

Doug frowned so softly at the words that Jono knew he’d gotten the message loud and clear: even watching would hurt like hell. Truthfully, if he had any remaining feeling around the edges of his seething wound, the bandages wouldn’t work even for show. There wasn’t a damn thing he was grateful to the furnace for, but it could’ve been worse: he could’ve lost his aesthetic to boot.

**Last chance to bail.**

“Just show me where to start.”

His voice was—weird. Like a zookeeper talking to a spooked pigeon, ignoring the exotic birds in his care to make sure the raggedy sky rat got a splint for its mangled wing. Demeaning wasn’t the word. He’d offer the same to a lofty eagle or a snarling griffin. Tired, maybe, that the world had presented one more thing that needed fixing yet couldn’t be fixed.

Tugging free the end of the bandage from where it was tucked at his side, Jono undid the three lowest loops in short order. He’d had enough years of practice for something bordering on military precision, not a movement wasted. When you scarcely had enough in you to get out of bed some days, it was an important skill.

But Doug, as in everything, was painstakingly committed. His eyes tracked the exact angle of every strip of leather, memorizing the paths it took for full coverage with minimal bulk, as if that too were something worth praise. Every loop he pulled away he draped over his own arm in neat rows. The top strips went easily, layered over Jono’s stomach in a way that made Doug stand much too close.

It was probably only phantom sweat pricking at Jono’s palms and underarms now. Not much moisture to go around. Jono always started with his waist, somewhere the wrappings could actually hold a grip. Then there was a foundation layer around his chest, some deft bandage origami to pad out his neck and jaw, and finally another row down around his stomach to hold it all in place. It meant Doug wouldn’t actually see anything until he was halfway through, wouldn’t encounter any of the scabbed over mess that seeped into the stomach bandages until the very end. Jono had happily climbed into a rollercoaster with a 100% kill rate and locked himself into the car, only realizing what he’d done once the noisy chains yanked him up, up, and up.

He knew what Doug looked like when there were questions rattling around his brain, but neither of them asked. Too distracted by the gravity of his job, Doug never saw the frantic panic growing in Jono’s eyes, fixed right on him.

Doug’s fingers brushed over Jono’s cheek as he pulled the topmost strip of leather away, and the furnace spilled out over his knuckles, sparking like a livewire, filling every crack with its roiling blaze. Finally he glanced up and met Jono’s gaze.

 _There you are_ , Jono could all but hear in that look.

It wasn’t—revelatory, a child’s whirring heartbeat as they listened to steps growing ever nearer, a crack of blinding light as the closet door was thrown open— _there you are!_ Not that. Music. Bloodied fingers on guitar, on harp, on lyre. A bright-eyed intern at the British Museum, sneaking into forgotten rooms of relics in the basement, paint on his fingers, dusty and determined and consumed. _There you are_ , in those words like polished marble, words that treated _him_ as the art form, raw and aching and all.

Jono tore his eyes away, focused on those nimble hands instead. Every bandage pulled away left an angry flare of fire in its path, a last desperate push to fill the emptiness, to keep it from view. It licked at Doug’s fingers and left scalding wisps of blistering skin, splinters of lightening that bruised in the darkest hues. Doug didn’t seem to notice. _Incompatible lifeglow_ , he remembered Warlock telling him once. A whip-crack of wrongness across that warm skin, a fracture in the code. Jono watched long enough to see the marks glimmer silver and fade.

Only when Doug’s hands stilled did Jono remember the purpose of all this.

He’d reached the lowest section of bandages, the ones that tugged his torso back into shape around his cracked ribs. Sure enough, the edges of his stomach had started to scab over, incorporating the leather like a welcome scaffold for growth. Once, as a younger man, he’d gotten so frustrated that he cut the edge of the bandage and left it in there. Worst medical lecture of his life. The furnace didn’t degrade his body anymore – well, much – but leather? That wasn’t something you were meant to leave in the broiler for weeks on end.

Doug made a weird abortive move near his face, then curled a hand through his hair to tug Jono’s gaze towards his own. _Tried to grab my chin_ , Jono realized with a fevered laugh, flames lapping at the shattered shores of his cheeks.

“You _promise_ it doesn’t hurt?” _Because if you brought me here to hurt you so you wouldn’t have to do it yourself, I will. But I want you to tell me._

 Jono pushed him gently away and reached for the notepad. As he wrote, Doug stood there with loops of leather still dangling neatly from his arm, still connected to Jono. A mummy’s valet.

**No nerves there.**

Not that the nerves he did have were particularly functional in the rest of him, either.

**Chronic wound. Google it later. It can’t heal it just pretends. Rip it all out or the leather will rot.**

“Has anyone ever given you an intervention about your aesthetic?” Doug grumbled as he twisted the bandage around his fist, bracing his other hand on Jono’s hip before he yanked. “Because dressing your wounds just to look cool is—”

Doug swallowed, hard.

Well.

That was one way to shut Doug up, at least. Least romantic thing in the entire universe, but it had its uses. When Doug shakily drew the newly freed strip around Jono’s back, Jono leaned forward and wrote out another note.

**Chin up, there’s a merit badge in it for you.**

Doug sounded slightly closer to laughing than to throwing up. He ripped off another round. “For what, Great War Ambulance Corp?”

Jono nodded seriously and tilted back his head, stretching both arms towards the ceiling. It made it far easier for Doug to finish off the final matted rounds. In the meantime, Jono poked around with a stick and tried to root out any lingering emotive expressions – he’d lost his concentration and missed all but Doug’s most obvious reactions. Now he could only feel his furnace, stoked to greater warmth by his own prodding. Doug didn’t seem to be feeling anything at all.

Doug set down the leather wrappings in a great heaping pile on the floor then sat back on Jono’s bed, watching him carefully. Kindling crackling in the fireplace. Still nothing from Doug.

**Silicone base layer, leather on top this time. More comfortable but harder to burn out of.**

“That’s it?” Doug frowned. “You don’t put anything on it?” He reached out towards the ragged edge of Jono’s stomach, and Jono stepped back out of reach.

Doug’s hand dropped back to his knee.

“…Sorry.”

The log split in two, flames greedily devouring the untouched innards. As Doug leaned back, giving him as much space as he could, Jono’s furnace curled deep in his chest in answer, a nesting storm of frustration.

It wasn’t his hearth – it was Doug’s. He hadn’t been prodding the edges of his own emotion but tending a kindred blaze, a kinetic maelstrom that seethed between them, a breath caught in lungs that refused to inhale. A flame needed oxygen to burn.

Against his better judgment, Jono turned on his heel and headed into the bathroom. He returned a minute later with a round jar of some mysterious gunk a doctor had given him years ago. It was supposed to keep his skin in better shape, but there wasn’t any point. There wasn’t getting _better._ This was all that he was.

**It doesn’t help. Takes forever.**

Doug read the instructions carefully, mouth still twisted in a frown that twisted Jono up even worse. “It says it would keep your wounds from cracking. Doesn’t that hurt?”

**I. Don’t. Feel. Anything.**

“Okay. But that means there’s no harm using it, either.” Doug wasn’t looking at him, only staring down at his own hands, the ones that had just ripped pieces of Jono’s skin apart.

 **What’s the point?** Jono tore off the scrap of paper and laid it on Doug’s lap, then crossed his arms over his ravaged chest.

Doug picked it up and crushed it in his fist. “Sometimes you can’t fix things. But it’s worse when nobody even wants to try. There’s not— _good._ Nothing can make it good. But there might be a better if you tried.” Finally he glanced up, jaw set tight. “Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t have to rip through scar tissue every time?”

**Sure. But I’m a lazy fuck who can’t be bothered.**

“It may shock you to know that some of us are downright industrious about the things we care about.” Before Jono could write a response to that, Doug had pulled Jono down onto the bed and pushed himself to his feet at the same time.

Returning from the bathroom with a wet washcloth, Doug settled down to one side of Jono’s legs and gave him a look that had a bit too much in common with a sad puppy and a disappointed schoolmarm all at once. A halfhearted shrug was the best Jono could summon up, but it seemed to do fine. Doug curled one hand at Jono’s hip and began to wipe away as much of the old residue as possible, starting with the bottom edge of the wound and working upwards once more.

This time, Jono didn’t watch his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to feel them instead. He hadn’t lied about the nerve endings – soft touch or punch to the gut, there wasn’t much going on there. But pressure he could feel sometimes, depending on what sat beneath the skin, and even if he couldn’t, the image of Doug’s hands at work was too much to keep. It wasn’t clinical. It was the absolute opposite and he was totally fucked.

“Your collarbones, don’t they…” _Hurt_ went unspoken this time.

Jono didn’t need to open his eyes to know how low his furnace was burning if Doug could see the jagged breaks where his collarbone used to be. His ribs looked much the same, though the skin was taut there, so they never showed unless you went poking around. The only thing that actually concerned him was the crestfallen tinge in Doug’s voice, like he’d just run the physics and realized putting his head on Jono’s chest would result in some internal evisceration. He rather liked it when Doug put his head on his chest. It wasn’t something he wanted to lose.

“Warlock could make you inorganic bone caps, probably. Then at least they wouldn’t scrape you.” A huff of breath against his shoulder, barely there, maybe imagined. “Sorry, you’ve probably already tried something like that. I…shouldn’t be doing the problem-solving thing right now.”

He…had not tried anything like that. Management mostly centered on not letting it get any bigger; the rest of him had already been written off as a loss. Letting Warlock fiddle would be even weirder, legitimately clinical in that The Aliens Are Probing Me kind of way, but it wasn’t like his friend would try to rebuild him from the inside. Probably. He’d gone through that part enough for one lifetime.

Cracking open an eye, Jono reached out and threaded his fingers through Doug’s hair, pulling him forward until their foreheads rested comfortably against each other. His flames nipped out, dusting wicked kisses against Doug’s throat, and he listened to Doug breathe, in and out, its own kind of miracle.

“You’re not a problem that needs solving,” Doug told him softly. Jono didn’t need to hear it, but he listened anyway, punch-drunk and warm. “Insufferably problematic, maybe. But.”

Ever since the day it gutted his life, Jono had known his furnace only as a thing of violence. Not something to roast marshmallows over, leaning against a loved one to chase off the winter chill. Melty chocolate and granola bars. Boy Scouts, yes, but a campfire not a corpse in the woods.

The cheeks he could feel, a bit. Doug’s thumbs running over the tattered edges and rubbing salve into the cracks. He knew Doug had categorized a hundred thousands details about him, knew he’d research and keep trying to problem-solve in the days to come, but that attention meant nothing compared to the way he smiled when he felt Jono’s cheeks twitch upwards into a ghastly grin.

Doctor visits had never involved a cute guy feeling him up while commenting on the structural integrity of his ribcage before. Doug could teach them some things. By the time he’d moved on to the first layer of bandages, he had all but climbed into Jono’s lap.

“Do you ever _not_ use the leather?” Doug sighed. “If you keep wrapping it that tightly, you’ll end up like one of those hourglass Victorians.”

Jono leaned back to give himself room enough to sign. “I’ll surpass them. No organs holding me back.”

That earned a quiet, startled laugh. Doug finished up the silicone and worked on a layer of linen in silence for a while. He’d found them in the very back of the cabinet, still packaged like they’d come straight off the shelf. They were too soft, too nice for a sad sack of bones. And white really wasn’t his color.

Finally satisfied, Doug rolled to the side and gave him a strange look, as if Doug was the one with a mess of fire trapped inside him. “Must hurt your back, though. So keep the leather off for an hour or two, okay?”

“That a request or a favor?”

Doug grinned. “Turn over.”

Jono did as asked, folding his arms and resting his forehead against them. He couldn’t write or sign from that angle, had nothing but Doug’s voice surrounding him. He kept waiting for the cheeky explanation, a sly little _massage is a language, you know?_ But it didn’t come.

When Doug’s palms finally flattened on Jono’s back, his thumbs dug into the muscles over his shoulder blades, then stopped. He pulled away.

A bucket of water on their cozy little fireplace.

 _Pulled something on a mission_ , Jono had told him. A white lie, tiny and benign, until Doug put the pieces together from the lines of his back.

“What did Warlock tell you?” Ice cold, an interrogator before his prisoner, bound and gagged. “Why did you—”

He broke off into another language, a hiss of self-hatred that ricocheted through Jono’s chest. His hands shook as he pushed up off the bed. Soon enough the door slammed behind him, and Jono was alone.

 

*

 

The empathic connection cut out in one jagged break like an old movie projector mangling the film.

He tried to send Warlock a telepathic ping, a little _I’m still alive, what next_ , but all he got was a text full of furious emoticons. Probably the closest Warlock had ever come to flipping someone off.

By the time Jono pried himself out of bed and shrugged on his leather jacket, jarring against the bright white of his wrappings, he’d prepared himself for every outcome. He’d been through them all before. He knew running away from it was the only real bullet in the back of his head, and just this once, he’d prefer not to wait for it.

He heard them long before he reached Doug’s workroom. Doug and Warlock scarcely needed spoken words to communicate, pinging each other constantly on their private line, and when they did speak it was as likely to be joking binary as English. Only if Doug were truly angry would he drop into someone else’s language, distancing himself from the emotion. He never raised his voice.

Now they screamed in something carved from a distant planet, a language that curdled all of Doug’s fury on his tongue. Whatever it was he hurled at Warlock, it was built to hurt. Jono slumped lower in a vain attempt to disappear into his jacket as he approached. He’d fucked this up and Warlock didn’t deserve the brunt of it.

Jono rapped his knuckles on the open doorway and two heads whipped his way. He didn’t flinch at the venomous spite in Doug’s gaze; he knew what self-loathing looked like, what self-destruction carved out of you. He met it head-on. But Warlock hissed something in a low tone, a trill like the pitter-pat of rain caught in the trees above, and Jono watched all emotion drop from Doug’s face in an instant, a shipwreck slipping silently under the waves.

Doug brushed past him without a word, and Jono caught his wrist.

Doug didn’t stop walking. Jono linked their fingers together and followed. Someone’s hands were shaking. Neither of them could breathe.

“I don’t love you,” Doug spat, the words scalding his tongue as they left.

Jono squeezed his hand. The words were a nightmare. But they didn’t make any sense. Disembodied specters, a song from a fever dream. He followed.

The same restlessness as earlier that day lay coiled in Doug’s heels, a nervous bounce in his gait, an urge to never stop running. This time it wasn’t an energy that still needed to burn its way out, it was a panic attack squeezing his heart to bursting, the kind that dragged his body one way and his mind another, a disconnect he couldn’t knit back into a whole. He finally wrenched his hand away from Jono’s to press his back against the wall, the only support he could rely on.

“He was supposed to tell you I don’t love you,” Doug laughed breathlessly. “Not _show_ you. Not rub it in your face and make you _feel_ just how little I—” He rubbed at his face and stared blankly at the opposite wall.

Jono stepped closer, crowding him in, narrowing his world down to the space between them. In normal circumstances it was a bad move, but letting Doug drift into the Too Much was even worse. They were having two different conversations. Jono had seen enough now to realize Warlock had never asked Doug’s permission to go broadcasting his emotions; whether it was in the unread paperwork or not, Warlock would get a kick in the arse for that later.

He laid one hand over Doug’s chest and covered his mouth with the other – _don’t speak, breathe for me._

“I tried,” he mumbled against Jono’s fingers. Like he’d failed to save someone on a mission; like he’d failed to save himself.

Psionic flames curled from the soft bandages along Jono’s cheeks, gentle breaths in blue and silver, a narrow line that flared up and died down again and again, in and out, in and out. Doug’s eyes tracked them slowly and after a long minute, Jono felt him try to breathe in time, chest jittery under Jono’s cold hand.

“Do you want to go back to your room and lie down?” Jono asked once his hands were free.

Even though Doug was near to sliding down the wall to sit in a lump on the floor, he shook his head.

“Kitchen for a cuppa?”

Another shake of the head.

Jono raked a hand through his hair and bit the goddamn bullet. “What do you think I saw, sunshine?”

“Nothing,” Doug signed back at him, as though he’d decided _I tried_ were fitting last utterances and refused to be budged on that front. “There’s nothing. I look at you and I feel nothing and now you know.”

And all at once, Jono understood what Warlock had done and why he had done it. The things he’d felt couldn’t be his own imagination at work – if there was anything Jono’s subconscious didn’t regularly pelt him with, it was _nice_ things. Apricots and meteor showers, a quiet broken only by its own longing for more stars, for music, for touch. If he hadn’t felt them himself, he’d never have believed in them, but they were a tangible truth for him now, squirreled away in his chest the same way Warlock kept snacks for later.

Doug felt everything and called it nothing. He was wired wrong, just like he always said, but it was only in the translation of it – reaching for the emotions of a different boy, standing colorblind before the raw and riotous work of his own heart. A disconnect with his body he could bridge with one look in the mirror. But a disconnect with his own emotions damned him. There was no one else to see them. They must not be there at all.

“You _know_ but you keep coming back,” Doug continued, eyes tracing the floor. “Like you think you can grow something in me. Like I’m not salted earth. Like you have hope. That’s worse.”

“Can I talk?” Jono snapped, but the corners of his eyes crinkled in a smile.

Doug curled his hands into fists at his sides and gave a nod, raising his head just enough to read.

“Warlock asked if I wanted to try feeling what he does. I said yes. I didn’t know you never gave permission. I’m sorry.” Jono gently pressed Doug’s hands back to his sides, catching the protest at such an apology. He held them there until he was sure Doug would let the words stand.

“You took my breath away.” He watched as Doug’s frown faded into confusion, into the little hint of annoyance whenever a metaphor sat uncomfortable and half-formed. Good, he was halfway there. Jono continued, “Do you understand what bullshit that is? Imagine your panic attack in a chest that hasn’t got lungs. That’s every moment of you. Fucking terrifying.”

Jono’s fingers twitched in a semblance of guitar strings. “I’ve been trying to turn it into music but I can’t. It’s how old poets talk about the Muses.” Fingerspelling it to the same rhythm of his tune. “Raw inspiration.”

“If that was nothing, then you’re right. You are broken. Your universal translator is fucked. Makes you more human, not less. You’re not a monster, you’re just colorblind in the land of Oz.” That earned a small flinch, words connecting like a fist to his jaw. Jono couldn’t be sure if it was from hearing someone flat out call him broken, or if it was Doug imagining someone trapped in the Emerald City who couldn’t see greens. He let Doug stew in the image for a minute longer, grasping for words that would punch through the ice, words that would sit sharp and true in whatever Doug read on his face.

“And if that, all of that, wasn’t love, then I don’t want love. I want this. I want you. Even if you’re a colorblind dumbass.” Jono cocked his head in an fond little tilt. “I want you to march back to Warlock and tell him to make it fair. I want to know if I sound like music to you or if you’d breathe metaphors that make more sense than I ever will.”

Doug stared at him like he’d finally encountered a man speaking in tongues, a language half-divine and utterly incomprehensible. “I don’t love you, and that’s _fine?_ ”

“Doug…what do you think love _is?_ ” Jono finally asked. A fucked universal translator indeed; they were still speaking different languages.

Confusion creeped into Doug’s blank face, a worry in his brow, a twist in his lip. Some things defied translation: Justice, Truth, Love. They were universal. They were understood. But all he thought of were butterflies in his chest, the all-consuming thought of touching someone’s hand, the blinding refrain of laughter coursing through him as Warlock carried him through the sky. Love wasn’t schoolboy crushes. He didn’t need butterflies, but he needed something. Anything to make it real.

“…if you love someone, you’re happier with them,” Doug said at last.

_If I can’t feel happy, like I was before, then I can’t be in love. If I’m not happy then it isn’t love._

“Love fixes things,” Jono agreed easily. “Like how my jawbone miraculously regrew on our first date.”

He pulled Doug’s hand against the bandages of his chest. “If you loved me, I guess I’d have some new organs under here. If you _really_ loved me, might even get a third kidney. You can make bank off one of those.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Isn’t it?” Jono shrugged. “Who are you mad at? If I loved you more, would you stop checking for grave dirt under your nails? Must not be enough for you.”

Anger coiling in Doug’s eyes, now. “You’re perfect. You deserve someone who—”

“ _I. Want. You._ ”

Jono grabbed Doug’s chin, the same way Doug had fumbled to do so earlier, and tugged him forward until he finally met Jono’s eyes. Any anger he could return triple; Doug had no idea just how deep a pool of rage Jono had to draw on. It wasn’t a fight he would win.

“You said there isn’t Good, but there can be Better. Don’t take that back.”

All the fight went out of Doug. He sagged against the wall.

“I know what you mean about happy, Doug. I get it all too fucking well. But I’m better with you. There is no bar here for you to reach. There is no expectation.”

“What did I feel when you let me—” Doug’s hands traced the bandages low on Jono’s waist. His eyes flicked up cautiously, still in doubt of the answer.

Jono couldn’t blush, but he was certain Doug caught a ghost of it on his cheeks. “That I’m a goddamn work of art and you plan to have a stern talk with the conservation director.”

“I thought… I thought you’d tricked me. You were waiting for me to slip up and be disgusted, and I, sometimes I don’t know anything about myself at all, so what if I was terrible and just didn’t know, or…” He tucked his head against Jono’s shoulder, and Jono knew to wait for him to continue.

“…I tricked you too. The first time we met, when I said telepathy doesn’t work on me. It does. It makes my skin crawl. I jammed the signal and forgot about it. But you went and learned a whole new language just for me, when I was the one silencing yours.”

That was not what Jono expected to hear.

For so many years, telepathy was the only way Jono could communicate with the world. The only way he could touch it and hold on, tangible in a way his body just wasn’t. The idea that Doug didn’t want to hear his voice hurt, but it was a simple pain, a papercut out of the blue. Sometimes Doug didn’t want to be touched, either, and that was fine. It wasn’t about Jono; it had nothing to do with him at all. If anything, a kneejerk reaction at telepathy made more sense for a guy who’d been raised up as a pawn in a zombie army, who’d had to fool his teammates into thinking he was fine if he ever wanted to regain their trust and acceptance. With telepaths like Emma around, Jono could understand the need to cut everyone out.

“You didn’t silence me,” he offered at last. “You taught me all the swears I wanted.”

Laughter bubbled up in Doug’s lungs, half-wild and fully unexpected. He grabbed hold of the lapels on Jono’s jacket, face still pressed into the line of his shoulder, and pulled him even closer than before. After a beat, Jono rested his hands at Doug’s waist, trying not to cage him, trying to give him the choice.

Doug raised his head enough to rest his chin on Jono’s shoulder, watching the wall behind him. “What if I can’t?”

When Jono tried to pull his hands away to answer, Doug tightened his grip on Jono’s jacket, refusing to give him the space. Maybe he didn’t want an answer. Or maybe—

Tiptoeing into Doug’s head wasn’t any different than with others, except for the Jono-shaped hole in the defenses. Except for the way he knocked, took off his shoes at the door, and didn’t venture far inside, just enough to gaze up at the vaulted, mirrored ceiling.

[ **Then you can’t. But seems like you keep choosing me anyway.** ]

Sometimes love wasn’t a feeling. Feelings faded. Feelings led you down wrong paths and twisted themselves into daggers for your back. Feelings had no controls. But sometimes love was a choice. On the bad days. When there were only bad days. Jono had known plenty enough of love, had chased feelings halfway across the globe and run from them even farther. But Doug chose him again and again, consciously and unconsciously, stubbornly and meekly, uncertain of his own reasons, questioning his motivations with every step, but still ending up right here. Still choosing Jono.

Doug didn’t answer, but Jono thought, maybe, just maybe, if he had any feeling through the wrappings on his shoulder, he would’ve felt Doug smile.

 

 

 ***

 

 

[ ** _Helloooo nurse._** ]

Doug toed the door shut behind him. “Must you say that every time?”

[ **It’s my right as an invalid.** ] Jono stretched his arms above him on the bed, folding them behind his head, and gave a wink. [ **And you live up to it _every_ time.** ]

With a shake of his head to dispel his faint blush, Doug went to grab the med-kit and gathered all of the bandages and supplies he’d need. He had spent a month trying to wheedle Jono into taking actual care of himself. When it failed, he simply declared that mission wrappings would be Jono’s job and home wrappings would be his own. He’d turned up sometime after dinner every other day since then.

[ **Mission was shit today.** ]

Doug hummed in acknowledgement – as long as he responded, it felt like a conversation, it _was_ a conversation. He rarely said anything while he worked at breaking Jono down and putting him back together again, but he always listened.

Once all the bandages were stripped off and abandoned in a pile on the floor, Doug would climb into his lap and trace his fingers along the ragged ridges of his cheeks, thumbs skirting the edges of his throat. He laid his palms flat on the remaining breadth of Jono’s chest and dragged them down, down.

Jono rambled. There was no yellow brick road to lead him through the ever-shifting paradigm of Doug’s head, no mouse for the cat to chase. It took a peaceful kind of effort, completely outside his wheelhouse, like learning classical flute instead of how best to smash a guitar on stage to riotous acclaim. Where Warlock took his own clay in hand and crafted a perfectly integrated facsimile of a humanoid brain for Jono to speak to, Doug made no preparations beyond opening the door to the impossible Rubik’s cube of his own hybridized head.

So he rambled. There were no right words, just words, a warm whisper to distract them both from the way arousal burned in Jono’s stomach, lower than Doug’s hands ever went. Maybe someday, maybe not. Jono watched Doug’s eyes as he worked and didn’t care a whit.

White bandages every time. Jono had long since run out of real complaints, though he huffed and scowled every time just to see that protective flare of _I Know Best_ in Doug’s sharp glare. Doug liked being able to run his knuckles over the soft linen to confirm everything was in its proper place, and if they’d nicked anything it would show through the white faster than anything else. He’d grown to hate the black mission wrappings once he realized how much they hid from him, but it was only fair – outside this space, this room, Doug hid from him, too.

Two months wasn’t long enough to transmute Jono’s voice from a burlap tarp to a plush safety blanket; he never reached out for Doug’s head when they were in the field or in public. There would be nothing there to find. But here was a different story. Doug knew it was coming, knew he’d walk into a good half hour filled with Jono’s voice in his ear, and showed up without fail. Doug had his hands full of Jono’s guts, but Jono still thought Doug was the brave one.

When he was finally satisfied with the wrappings, Doug tilted Jono’s head to the side and leaned in to press a kiss under his ear, right at the corner of his would-be jaw. Jono’s eyes crinkled at the gesture, and he caught Doug’s head as if to return it only to ruffle his hair into utter disarray instead. It wouldn’t do to have a boy sat in your lap so long without losing a bit of his immaculate poise. Letting his messy locks lay where they fell, Doug got up from the bed and went to rummage in his backpack for the pile of books he always brought with. Never English. Never in any alphabet Jono could even recognize.

Jono wasn’t stupid, though. He knew a poetry book when he saw one.

“Read to me?” he signed as Doug turned back his way. The moment they separated was always the signal for Jono to vacate his head. They’d leave each other’s guts where they were for the rest of the evening. Theoretically. Jono had still felt Doug’s heart jump under his palm too many times to count.

Doug brought his books to bed and curled in next to Jono, resting his head on Jono’s chest with its freshly wrapped bandages. Jono looped an arm around him so his hand could rest on the warm stretch of skin where Doug’s shirt had rucked up to his lower ribs. Still amazed he was allowed to.

For all his reputation as a bookish nerd, Doug rarely had time or attention to read for pleasure. Jono always blinked back a fond smile when Doug cracked open a book and immediately forgot his request. He drummed his fingers in a parody of Morse code on Doug’s side until he finally paused on a page and startled back to himself.

“Yes. Right. Sorry.” Sheepish, since he knew Jono couldn’t speak to him, mind and voice and hands all occupied. “Let’s see…”

Doug cleared his honeyed throat and another language blossomed on his tongue, distant and near, spun silk draping over them both. He never fully settled into speaking languages that weren’t his own, but you couldn’t tell from his voice, from the way every word kissed his lips.

तस्या मुखस्यायतलोचनायाः कर्तुं न शक्तः सदृशं प्रियायाः  
इतीव शीत-द्युतिर् आत्म-बिम्बं निर्माय निर्माय पुनर् भिनत्ति

Jono closed his eyes, not silly enough to wait for a translation that wouldn’t come. It was his turn to listen.

सोऽयम् अभ्युदितः पश्य प्रियाया मुख-चन्द्रमाः  
यस्य पार्वण-चन्द्रेण तुल्यतैव हि लाञ्छनम्

Someday he’d drag Doug to Birmingham to see if his voice autotuned to his surroundings, if he could make even Brummie have charm. They’d need Warlock there to record it, of course. He could already picture the mixed horror and delight on the alien’s face if Jono’s gambit paid off.

Doug never followed his place on the page with his finger, never marked his pages beyond dog-earing those that made him think. Sometimes he read the same page for so long that even Jono knew it had ended long ago, that Doug had forged on into words of his own, testing them on his tongue, accustoming himself to the saying of them. Jono listened to those most carefully of all.

When Doug was ready to share them, Jono would be ready, too.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Poetry from [here](https://swarajyamag.com/culture/this-valentines-day-take-some-help-from-sanskrit-poetry).
> 
> Art by villainveins on tumblr!


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